Last year, review site Yelp celebrated International Women’s Day by announcing the Women-Owned Business attribute alongside a partnership with Rebecca Minkoff and Female Founder Collective, to help people support female entrepreneurs in their local communities across the country. Since its launch, more than 72,000 businesses have added the feature to their Yelp pages.
Now, Yelp is making that feature searchable, so that it’s even easier for users to discover and support women-owned businesses. Yelp has noticed a rising trend among reviewers mentioning if a company is female-owned, up 20 percent since a year ago and 54 percent from five years ago.
“We understand that consumers want to champion women entrepreneurs and know that their hard earned money is going into businesses they care about,” says Emily Washcovick, Manager of Local Business Outreach at Yelp. “In fact, we see that in looking at the average rating of all open U.S. businesses with at least 5 reviews, businesses marked as women-owned had higher average ratings than businesses marked as not women-owned. The effect holds true across just about every category of business on Yelp.”
According to Yelp, 72,454 businesses in the United States have added the “women-owned” tag since it became available in March 2019. There has also been a more than 20 percent increase in mentions of women-owned businesses in U.S. reviews since last year.